Nineteenth-Century Illustration Technologies

"The Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Illustration: Woodblock Engraving, Steel Engraving, and Other Processes"
Victorian Web / literature, history & culture in the age of Victoria

"he history of nineteenth-century printing is intimately bound up with the engraved boxwood block, the single most significant piece of illustration technology, which dominated early Victorian book illustration. The first book to be so illustrated was Thomas Bewick's The General History of Quadrupeds (1790). The artist engraved his own white line illustrations on boxwood blocks, and the artist-engraver remained a common figure in book illustration until mid-century.

"Between 1850 and 1900, approximately 1,200 "art" books were produced in Britain. The decline in importance of the woodblock over those five decades as new technologies were introduced is evident: in the 1860s, only 6.5% of these books utilised two or more different methods of illustration, but by the 1890s this figure had risen to almost 30%...."


(from Victorian Web, used w/o permission)
"Wood-engraving of a ship in peril by Thomas Bewick."

I'm very interested in the history of visual communication - including writing, printing, and book-making (each its own subject). This is not particularly light reading, but it's a pretty good look at some technological and creative changes of the nineteenth century, and how they affected what people saw in books.